Mark 7b

Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Mark 7:24-37

 

Sometimes, just reading the bible is not enough. Often, people read a little bit and start spouting that – usually for a cause of their own. This is often misguided because generally, scripture has to be taken as a part of the whole.

There’s a clever analogy that is often used stupidly to back up the idea that there is only one God, but that all the religions point to that one God which goes like this;- 3 blind men are trying to describe an animal that they are all touching. One says ‘this creature is long and thin and flexible’. One says ‘this creature is fat and big and round and strong’. The third says ‘it is droopy and flaps around a lot’.

The clever part of this analogy is that often people do look only at the small part that they have to hand, but really, they should be looking at the over-all picture. Obviously, these blind men were describing an elephant, but we as Christians are not blind men. We have the Bible to read, God to know and creation to study. And because of this, we should be looking at any part of the bible as a part of the whole.

A theological word that is used to describe the entire story of the bible is ‘metanarrative’ which basically means overall story. We must see the little story in front of us as a part of the overall story.

Cults are often grown up out of this blinkered attitude and often atheists (such as my father) will use little crumbs of bible knowledge that they have picked up by flipping through trying to prove what they want to prove.

This is why one of the major points about reading the bible is that we have to read it in humility – we have to become enquiring – I often say that three of the most important words a Christian can learn are ‘I don’t know’ – I say this because we need to become like children, wide-eyed and excited about what we find when we crack open the Bible.

The reason I start with this is that the following passage is one of those that you’re sure God put in to wind up bible teachers.

Mark never wastes words. If he mentions something, then it must be important. Here, Mark particularly mentions the nationality of this woman. He refers to her as being Greek and born in Syro-phoenicia. To us, 2000 years later in Great Yarmouth, Greece is about 1000 miles away, and the Phoenicians are more than 1000 years gone. For this reason, we don’t really pull out much meaning from this reference.

In fact, our understanding of the word ‘Greek’ is culturally inaccurate and we should really understand that the reference in this instance to be more about her religion than her nationality – she was a pagan, rather than a Jew.

In Jesus’ day the Jews were a very exclusivist people – they would not have dealings with non-jews, because to do so would cause them to be ceremonially unclean.  Jesus lived in a very racist time and place.

 

To the Jews, outsiders would have been known as dogs – or more like ‘bitches’. In the Middle East today, there are still very similar cultural issues of racism that cause problems if you’re not an Arab. So here we have Jesus talking to this woman and referring to her as a dog because in His time, this is what would be expected of Jesus. Sort of.

The word that Jesus uses for dog here is not the same as the word for bitch. The actual word more closely resembles our word for puppy or alternatively ‘small dog’. Jesus is saying ‘what would you like, little puppy?’ He’s not driving her away with the harsh words that she expected of a Jewish Rabbi, but in some sense being welcoming in a way that is understood in the culture in which Jesus was placed. Jesus is using language to mock the cultural standards of His day which were pretty atrocious in the first place.

Now, pulling back a little out of the situation and looking at the surrounding script, Jesus says ‘it is not right to take children’s bread and throw it to their dogs’. Jesus is saying it is not right to deprive God’s chosen children in order to satisfy those who are not his immediate concern. Slowing right down, we look and see that Jesus isn’t saying ‘no’ – more that He is saying ‘God will get to you... let me deal with the chosen people and then I’ll get to you’. He’s saying ‘first things first, one thing at a time’.

The woman then responds in what I suspect may be God-granted wisdom. Firstly,  she understands that she is second to the Children that God has chosen, secondly that she sees the long-range mission that Jesus is on and that she knows that He will get to her, but also thirdly, she shows tenacity in her willingness to confront Jesus and show Him that she is for Him and His mission and that she is in desperate need of Him. Her strength of character aligned to her wisdom is attractive enough that Jesus looks at her and sees one that really gets what it means to follow Him. And so her daughter is healed.

If we take another step back and look at earlier parts of Mark 7, we see that Jesus is already talking about religious people in a derogatory manner. He sees some of the highest authorities in Jewishdom and openly denounces them as being hypocrites. So we can see that He is stepping away from Religion and from those who follow ‘rules taught by men’ and that He is beginning now to look for people whose hearts are His and who want to get to Him no matter who they are. 

We looked previously at how Jesus taught His disciples – firstly by teaching them a little and then sending them out, then they return talking of great miracles when Jesus pulls the floor out from under them again which freaks them out. Jesus was not wandering around being random, He was (and is) actively on a mission.

The move to Tyre and Sidon – which are outside Jesus’ usual haunts signal a move toward the non-Jews. After all, his earlier ministry had been in the areas around Galilee which were historically very Jewish. Tyre and Sidon were beautiful cities with amazing architecture – as seaports, they were important to the Romans and so had been upgraded with Roman architecture. Previous to this, they had been conquered by the Greeks, and before them, the Persians. Because of this, they had become liberal, culturally and religiously permissive and strongly ‘Hellenised’ which refers to the complicated religion that the Greeks practiced, which had grown out of polytheism from the east as well as a great many home-grown gods.

So let’s just remember for a moment that Jesus is about 30 miles (if in Tyre) from Capernaum, but also a million miles away culturally and religiously from his usual setting, and that in this setting He meets someone who sees Him for who He is, and calls on Him. This is a message to non-religious sinners like you and I. We don’t have to have come from a holy-holy background to access Jesus and speak with Him, but we are responsible for our actions in coming to Him – we are not to be silly children who spout rubbish and try to challenge the religious Right, but we are to come to Him as we are, with wisdom that God gives us (not books) and approach Him in reverence and humility. We should be bold in our desire to see him, but when we do see Him and are accepted by Him and in that, become His children - we will honour Him, worship Him and long to be His in all that we do.

Someone once said that Jesus coming to the earth as ‘flesh’ would be like one of us cramming our existence into that of a slug. And even that comparison doesn’t come close to what Jesus coming to earth really meant.